The great Anglo-American designer-pilot. Colonel S. F. Cody, poses for
"Flight's" cameraman aboard his massive Cathedral biplane.
FIFTY YEARS OF FLYING . . .
to try and persuade the Wright Brothers to continue their
experiments in this country, but the Treasury refused to
provide the necessary finance, and so the Wrights stayed in
America. As a result, the Factory was obliged to use home-
produced talent, and several names that were later to become
famous entered the story at this stage, including S. F. Cody,
Lt. J. W. Dunne, and the town of Farnborough, to which the
Balloon Factory and Balloon Section of the Royal Engineers
moved in 1905.
From the start Farnborough was a centre of British
aeronautical research, its first experimental and training work
covering such things as spherical and elongated balloons,
aircraft engines, kites, aerial photography and signalling
devices. The Man-lifting Kite Section had been formed in
1894 under Capt. B. F. S. Baden-Powell, but it did not come
into prominence until 1906, when "Colonel" S. F. Cody
was appointed Chief Instructor in Kiting. Until his death
in an aircraft accident seven years later, this colourful figure
with the goatee beard, and long hair sprouting from under an
enormous Stetson hat, remained a dominant figure in British
aviation, combining rare skill and courage with a flair for
showmanship that was displayed not only in his personal
appearance but in stunts such as crossing the Channel in a
small boat towed by several of his kites. Although unrelated,
he traded on the publicity value of his famous namesake and
fellow-American, Col. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and was to be
seen astride a richly-saddled white horse almost as often as
on the pilot's seat of an aircraft.
Dunne was an entirely different character—a brilliant
metaphysicist (and, later, author) who decided that the
proper way to build an aircraft was on the swept-wing,
tailless formula—not with an eye to future compressibility
worries (!) but because tests with paper models had shown
that such a layout offered inherent stability, at a time when
"balance" was the would-be aviator's biggest headache.
His story, too, has a touch of Dick Barton, for, realizing the
potential military value of an inherently stable aircraft, the
War Office decided to hide Dunne's experiments under a
veil of official secrecy. As a result, one day in 1907 a party
of men from the Farnborough Balloon and Kite Section were
put into civilian clothes and packed off to the Duke of
72 FLIGHT
AtholTs estate at Glen Tilt, Blair Atholl, complete with
Dunne's first full-size aircraft, the D.i, fitted with two 12 h.p.
Buchet engines. As the Duke was by tradition allowed to
maintain a private army, there were no fears of unwanted
observers. «
The D.i proved the soundness of Dunne's ideas and ww
followed by further machines on the same principle; the
D.3 was constructed at Farnborough and later ones built
privately at Eastchurch. In addition, both seaplane and
flying-boat versions of the Dunne biplane were built in
America by the Burgess Company. But it gradually became
apparent that inherent stability was not so essential for a
military aircraft as good manoeuvrability and the Dunne
formula was virtually forgotten until a few years ago, when
a new breed of swept-wing, tailless aircraft came into being
for rather different reasons.
While Dunne was busy at Blair Atholl, Cody, too, was
making progress. As a start he helped Col. Capper complete
one of the 1904 airships—the Nulli Secundus—as the first
British military airship. It flew successfully in September,
1907, marking the start of a seven-year period of airship
development at Farnborough. But Cody was more interested
in aeroplanes and before long had fitted a 12 h.p. Buchet
engine to one of his kites, and had flown it successfully,
minus pilot.
The next step was, obviously, to build a full-size piloted
version of the same thing. Cody was allowed to power this
with a 50 h.p. Antoinette engine originally intended for the
unsuccessful Nulli Secundus II, and he arranged it to drive
two pusher propellers; the result looked something like the
Wright biplane. It was in this aircraft that Cody made his
first hops in May, 1908, on Laffan's Plain. On October 5th
of the same year he made the first official flight in a piloted
aeroplane in Great Britain—a measured distance of 496
yards at a height of 50-60 ft.
Six months later the War Office decided to abandon all
work on aeroplanes as the cost—a total of £2,500 to that time
—was considered to be too great. By comparison, in that
same year of 1909, Germany allotted a total of something like
£400,000 to military aircraft development and production.
Fortunately, British aeroplane development did not come
to a full stop, as "private enterprise" had come into the
picture by then. In one sense, of course, it had been there
for some time past: every year saw its quota of weird and
wonderful flying machines, built by enthusiasts whose
normal trades ranged from making pianos to basket-weaving.
The results often appeared to incorporate a selection of the
maker's stock parts and few of them achieved even a pilotless
hop; but from the multiplicity of inventors there did emerge
a few who were to win a place in British aeronautical history.
Such a man was Henry Farman, whose circular flight of
more than one kilometre on January 13th, 1908, to win the
Deutsch-Archdeacon prize of £2,000 marked the start of
practical flying in Europe, some two years after Santos-
Dumont had made the first flight in a powered aircraft on
this side of the Atlantic.
Aviators were still being ridiculed in Britain at that time,
and a prominent member of the Aero Club, J. T. C. Moore-
Brabazon, advised his fellow enthusiasts to follow Farman's
example and transfer their activities to France. He took his
One of the series of Dunne tailless, back-swept biplanes, built at East-
church and possessing a very high degree of natural stability.
The first aerial post in the United Kingdom : a cover carried by Gustav
Hamel on the famous London-Windsor flight (September 9th, 1911)